Felt Tiles: An Exercise in Colour Through Fibre Migration

 The International Felters Federation has added  three new videos for members. One of the videos by my favourite felt artist Fiona Duthie has been a great exercise in both felting and fulling.

Based on a background of three colours it has been interesting to see how the primary colours changed tonal quality due to the migration of the underlying felt fibres. 

The bright yellow took on a coppery tone in places and the dull green took on both yellow and bronze tones.

Felt migration occurs as the fibres of an underlying layer work their way through a top layer giving an interesting tonal quality.

Each tile started out as 7 inches square and was fulled down to 31/4 inches. The fulling process certainly took a lot of work but I learned just how malleable wool can be as I shaped it into equal sized squares (well - almost equal!). I was quite concerned about this process as I have trouble getting consistently smooth edges on my work. After hours of rubbing and shaping the sixteen tiles I dont think edges will be a problem for now on.

Fiona Duthie also explained a host of embellishments that can be used for surface design. this was probably the most disappointing aspect of my work. I think I was too focussed on the fulling to spend enough time playing with the design. Here is my reflection on what I would do next time:

My prefelts werent hard enough and lacked a crisp edge - they sank too much into the background. So next time I will felt my prefelts more to get a tighter textile to work with.

I didn't have any commercial pencil roving so I decided to make my own by rolling light strands of wool around a bamboo skewer. It worked pretty well and I think with a little more work to make it tighter I will use it in the future.

Instead of sewing cotton (suggested in the IFF video) I used some fine hand spun. I really like this affect and will use it again.

On several of the corners I used silk cut into a triangle shape. The corner design made it very difficult to full down. Next time I will keep my silk for the body of the design. I also used some old felted project and some of the shapes were also too close to the corners. They are better left in the body.

Looking at the tiles now I can see I used mainly straight lines - I think it needs a few more arcs and curves. I also think I need more surface design elements. I thought being fulled down so hard it would look crowded - but some of the tiles look a bit empty. All part of the learning curve.

The dull green is probably not bright enough as a base colour as it makes it look very drab. Next time I will use a brighter base and use colours like the green for surface design.

Here is the almost finished design. I will add some more stitching to the "boring" tiles before I attempt to mount it on a canvas.